1. Field of the Invention:
This invention relates to laundry machines, and more particularly to a mechanism in the laundry machine to improve the dispensing of laundry additives.
2. Description of the Prior Art:
Recent automatic clothes washing machines customarily proceed through a sequence of operation in order to wash, rinse and spin dry clothes. The sequence ordinarily includes a presoak, a first liquid extraction operation, a wash operation, a second liquid extraction operation, a rinse operation, and a final extraction operation.
In order to obtain the most desirable results from these machines, it has been found advantageous to introduce certain additives into the water or liquid used for a particular operation. A pre-wash additive is normally used in the soak operation, a soap or detergent is normally used in the washing operation and a bleach is often also used in this operation, while rinse agents are added to the rinse water.
In an automatic washing machine, it is desirable that these additives be dispensed automatically. When the dispensing of additives is automatic, the user may load the fabrics to be washed into the wash tub and place the additives into their proper compartments or containers, and the machine automatically completes the cycle of operations. Also, the best results are obtained if these various additives are dispensed with liquid so that additives are metered into the wash tub and evenly distributed rather than being concentrated into a few of the articles.
One such dispensing system for an automatic washing machine is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,727,434 assigned to the same assignee as the present invention. As disclosed in that patent the dispenser is normally latched to the access cover of the laundry machine for movement with the cover to an open position for access to the wash tub for loading fabrics therein, and unlatched for movement independent of the cover to a position over the tub for introducing treating agents into the dispenser.
The dispenser includes a plurality of compartments for storing treating agents to be dispensed selectively during the prewash, wash and rinse operations and a plurality of liquid inlets arranged to communicate with the compartments. In its operative effective position over the tub the liquid inlets are in a position to cooperate with the outlets of a liquid supply device. The liquid supply device is sequentially controlled to selectively direct recirculation liquid into preselected ones of the liquid inlet for mixing liquid with the treating agents being held in the compartments to flush the agents into the wash tub at predetermined times in a cycle of the automatic washing machine.
In such a dispenser as described above the dilution and flushing of bleach is particularly troublesome because of its propensity to discolor clothes if the bleach has not been properly diluted sufficiently prior to introduction into the tub containing the clothes. To accomplish proper dilution of the bleach the compartment for dispensing the bleach is provided with a siphon tube which has one leg longer than the other with the longer leg extending down outside the bleach compartment while the shorter leg is terminated a distance above the bottom of the bleach compartment so that the bleach solution cannot be dispensed from the compartment until water entering the compartment has been raised to above the siphon opening thereby assuring dilution of the bleach before dispensing into the tub. One of the difficulties with this arrangement however is that the dispensing system utilizes recirculation water from the tub as the means for flushing the agents into the wash tub. Recirculation water, that which has been used previously in the soak operation contains lint or other relatively large contaminants which when introduced into the bleach compartment can clog the siphon and render its operation unusable.
By my invention I have improved the additive dispensing system in that I have provided a means for removing most of the contaminating lint and other large particles from the recirculation water just prior to introduction into the bleach compartment.